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here is the code:

print('Hello World\nIt\'s hot today')

okay I get the first slash is an escape sequence but whats the second slash for ?

j1-lee
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Veekash Singh
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    That's to escape `'`. Try removing ```\``` there and re-running the code. – j1-lee Feb 17 '22 at 16:38
  • first `\n` is for new line. second `\`is for escaping apostrophe. – Talha Tayyab Feb 17 '22 at 16:39
  • Here is a list of all of the escape sequences in python: https://www.python-ds.com/python-3-escape-sequences – Locke Feb 17 '22 at 16:39
  • `\n` is a new line, `\'` is an escaped quote (which would not be necessary if the string itself used double quotes... `print("Hello World\nIt's hot today")` does the same) – Tomerikoo Feb 17 '22 at 16:40
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    Does this answer your question? [Having both single and double quotation in a Python string](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7487145/having-both-single-and-double-quotation-in-a-python-string) – Tomerikoo Feb 17 '22 at 16:41
  • The second slash is used to escape the single quote ('). Without the slash, the string would have ended at 'Hello World\nIt' because python interpreter will think the single quote signifies end of your string. – lollalolla Feb 17 '22 at 16:42

2 Answers2

2

print('Hello World\nIt\'s hot today')

The 2nd slash here, which appears before a ' character, allows you to use this character in a string which is scoped with it (otherwise, the Python interpreter has to conclude that this character is where the string ends).

Alternatively, you could scope this string with " instead of ', which would make that 2nd slash redundant:

print("Hello World\nIt's hot today")
2

The second \ is to escape '. Without this, python would see

'Hello World\nIt's hot today'

Now, it would interpret 'Hello world\nIt' as a string, because you ended it with '! Then it does not know what to do with the rest of your code s hot today', resulting in an syntax error.

To avoid escaping ', you could instead use ":

print("Hello World\nIt's hot today")

The same goes for escaping ". If you want to print a string He said "Hello, world!", then you would want either one of the following:

print("He said \"Hello, world!\"")
print('He said "Hello, world!"')
j1-lee
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